Introducing: Petri Dish Talk

I was delighted to stumble across a neuroscience blog that I hadn't seen before. Petri Dish Talk is run by Mohammed Rahman, a neurobiology researcher who now works in biotech, and who has also worked with drugs that affect the CNS such as Carbidopa and Divalproex, which are used to treat Parkinson's and Bi-polar disorder respectively.

Among the few posts currently published, Rahman discusses the tension between research and industrialisation in his first offering. He suggests that departmentalising projects will allow errors to slip through the net in spite of well-intentioned lab researchers, and that biotech industries should do more to ensure research and experimental integrity instead of following a business model that tends to be blinkered and short-sighted in regard to such concerns.

After a very brief and informative post on BOLD fMRI that excellently serves as an expanded definition of the term, he launches into a more detailed post about dendritic pruning within the wider issue of neuroplasticity. With decent illustrations, Rahman talks about how Long-Term Potentiation (LTP) is one of the many theories advanced to explain this adaptability of the brain and the mechanism by which the dendrites are pruned. He ends with looking forward to a future in which neuroplasticity will be vigorously studied and what it will have to say about our minds as a physical structure (and rightly so).

In the last two posts we are treated to a double-whammy that explains how meditation can bring about neurophysiological changes, by virtue of a 2007 PNAS paper on the neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-time meditation practitioners, that long-time (focused) experts tend to have specialised attentional networks with a simultaneous decrease in "chatter". In the second part, Rahman discusses a 2008 paper that discusses these changes: larger volumes of grey matter in the hippocampus and frontal cortex. On the face of it,this seems as natural as a professional athlete gaining muscle mass due to exercise, so in the same way an experienced meditator gains greater "strength" in certain neural circuits due to focus and concentration-oriented meditating.

Overall I think this is a good start for a blog and I was impressed with the quality of the information as well as the easily readable presentation. I'll definitely be looking forward to more contributions.

We've Been Nominated!

The team at ResearchBlogging.Org and Seed Media Group are honouring the best bloggers who discuss peer-reviewed research in the first Research Blogging Awards. Over 400 nominations were made, and an expert panel of judges have whittled them down to 5-10 blogs per category which are deemed to be the "best of the best".

I feel very honoured to have my blog nominated under the category of Best Blog - Psychology, and would like to thank the judges for this. I would also like to give a very heartfelt thank you to all my readers.

To view a record of my peer-reviewed research posts, please see a list of all my research posts or my user page at ResearchBlogging. Voting is underway as registered bloggers have been sent invitation by ResearchBlogging.Org. If you're not registered (and blog about peer-reviewed research) but would like to vote, register here.

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UPDATE 23 March 2010: The award for Best Blog-Psychology went to Christian Jarrett of the BPS Research Digest. And I wish him a hearty congratulations on the achievement.

NeuroWhoa is GREEN For Iran!

"Mahmoud, you can crush the bones of the people

but never their dreams of freedom."

- Phoenixsgu on Twitter

Science Blogging Needs YOU!

Daniel Brown over at BioChemicalSoul.Com is an extremely passionate biologist. He also runs one of the best biological science blogs out there. He's just written up a great essay on the merits of science blogging, how it can help you, how it can help others, and how you can just generally benefit from the whole cornucopia of citizen journalism.

So head on over there and find out how YOU can become a Science Blogger!

Encephalon #64

The 64th edition of Encephalon - the neuroscience and psychology blog carnival - is now online and hosted by The Neurocritic. Head on over there to check out the contributions!

Upcoming 'New Scientist' Feature

The next issue of New Scientist magazine will run a feature on 'God And The Mind: What Happens When Neuroscience Meets Religion?'

This looks right up my street! Though I sigh at the thought of the vested interests taking part in the same old 'science vs. religion' debates that this will generate.

Anyhow, stay tuned. :-)

Happy New Year 2009

"Ah, go, a liege of love, of wine, of song,
With truth and honour, mirth and wit along
The ways of friendliness; and take delight
In Nature's gifts; and have no foe but wrong!"

--The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam

Happy New Year!

We're in the Top 50!

It hasn't been all that long since I started this blog, and what I've put up here so far is barely a tenth of what I've wanted to write. So it was surprising when I learned today that this blog is included in the Top 50 Psychology Blogs at Networked Blogs!

Even though we're currently at #33, and this site is an extension of a Facebook application, it still feels good. Thanks to all my regular readers! :)

A Short Break

Regular readers may have noticed the proliferation of humourous postings of late and a decline in "pure science" posts. I have to admit that I'm writing up a thesis at the moment and am understandably busy with it, so I hardly have much time to write some good analyses of current neuroscience or psychology issues. Hence the tendency to have a quick jab or poke fun as a means to relieve the stress on myself as well as have a laugh.

Not to worry though, I will be back with something of a bang by the end of next week. (Or realistically, a shaky sputtering!)

The Initial Potential

Hi there!

Fellow neuronerds may have guessed the humour in the post title; a neural event (like a thought, for instance) happens due to neurons communicating with each other by sending electrical impulses called 'action potentials'. You could say that the action potential is the beginning of a process that leads to a thought, hence the title of this post that inaugurates this blog! Hee hee ha ha, we can all stop laughing at my geekiness now.

But anyway, I decided to keep a blog of my own after realising how many other blogs there were that were devoted to science subjects. I do have a few favourite blogs that I like to read but not all of them really hit the spot and make me go, "whoa! I just learnt something amazing!" So I hope to do that with this blog, and I'm not claiming to be a big expert on science or something. I would just like to create a space where readers can share my sense of "whoa!" when I read a piece of neuroscience news that actually has an impact on people's daily lives or something else that is relevant. During my years as a psychology undergraduate and even now as a neuropsychologist-in-training, I regularly come across little pieces of "whoa!" that tend to stop me in my tracks and, like, think about stuff for a minute.

Some time ago I was chatting to a friend who made a very good point about the general inaccessibility of scientific articles. His argument went something like: "You scientists always tend to talk in hoity-toity ways and it'd be nice if things were explained clearly." After years of suffering neural meltdown every time I read an academic paper, I can share this guy's pain and agree that there is a major problem with the presentation of scientific data and they way it contributes to public education. And again I'm not claiming to be an expert who can do this, but let's hope that this will be a place where things that interest me in the neurosciences will be explained clearly enough so that a substantial number of people can join me in sitting back and exclaiming "whoa!"

Enter The Dragon..